From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Date: Wed, 26 Aug 1998 10:18:56 +0200
From: Elliott.Hughes@genedata.com Elliott.Hughes@genedata.com
Subject: [9fans] X device
Topicbox-Message-UUID: 7d90b02a-eac8-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025
Message-ID: <19980826081856.2ZMZCfYzt5yRnq9aitaFjI-MWh-YnypuMYFZxRAz5Ow@z>


> Would it be more practical to play with the X server extensions
> mechanism, to decode the Plan 9 protocol, the same way postscript
> etc is added to some X servers?

this is bound to be more painful than what rob did.

> It would be nice if the Plan 9 and Inferno protocols could converge,
> and perhaps gain a wider acceptance as an alternate protocol
> for networking graphics.

but VNC goes to show that what the world really desires are Yet More
Stupid Protocols. people want IMAP and POP and CIFS (SMB) and
the like. it's a common belief in bioinformatics (i don't know if that's
the right English word, but i mean "computing focused on biological
questions") that their problems are special. that off-the-shelf solutions
from the general computer world aren't suitable. so their first instinct
isn't to stick their data in Oracle, it's to design and implement their
own DBMS. i'd laugh at this if it weren't so prevalent in computer
science in general. a variation on "not invented here", i suppose. so
rather than have a decent distributed filesystem, we bungle on with
NFS, admit it isn't really suitable for accessing our mail, and invent
an otherwise unnecessary new protocol. (and hey, let's base it on
LISP s-expressions: that'll convince everyone that we're real computer
scientists who know what they're doing!)

i think i saw an x-files episode where they explained that it's actually
a government conspiracy to keep programmers in full-employment
ready to be enlisted at the turn of the century when they'll be needed
to fix all the vital computer-based infrastructure that doesn't make
it past 1999-12-31...

-- 
http://users.ch.genedata.com/~enh/